Today is an important date in the histories of both consumer protection and crowdfunding: For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission took legal action against someone who used Kickstarter to fund a project that they didn’t produce. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since the man behind the scheme has no money to distribute to backers, the settlement doesn’t actually do anything for people who backed The Doom That Came To Atlantic City. [More]

Kickstarter is not, and never has been, a store. Yet companies that use the platform to fund the production of a new product are eventually supposed to, um, make that product. Backers who contributed more than a million dollars to produce thin e-ink watches want answers from the company that promised these watches, and they aren’t satisfied with “we’re broke” as an answer. [More]

The original Pebble smartwatch campaign in 2012 was a fabulous success, collecting $10.3 million dollars in Kickstarter pledges. It produced a real product that shipped, but not after some backers were disappointed when the company stocked Best Buy’s shelves before sending out watches to Kickstarter backers that had been paid for up to a year earlier. In its new campaign to launch a color watch, Pebble promises: that will not happen again. [More]

If you’ve been avoiding backing interesting projects on Kickstarter because you didn’t want to deal with Amazon Payments or log in to two accounts to pledge a couple of bucks for some potato salad, your wait is over: Kickstarter is breaking up with Amazon and switching to a different payments processor, Stripe. [More]

Back in early September, Consumerist featured the LinkWallet, an ultra-thin, smartphone-connected wallets funded through Kickstarter that caught backers’ imaginations and $59,000 of their money. There were several similar wallets available around then, but what distinguished the LinkWallet was the creators’ apparent inability to ship wallets. LinkWallet had assured everyone that the wallets would ship by the end of 2014: how’s that going? [More]

You have an idea, or you have an urgent financial need, and you want to turn to the Internet to make funding happen. Or let’s say some acquaintance is asking for money on Facebook for what seems like a cool project or worthy cause, but you wonder: what the heck is an “indie go go?” Why is the site itself asking me for a donation, too? [More]

Back when the guy known now as Kickstarter Potato Salad Guy raised about $55,000 for his first-ever attempt at making potato salad, everyone was wondering how in the heck you could possibly make that much potato salad to fulfill rewards for his backers. And now he’s got the answer — he’s going to throw a massive potato party, complete with potato sack races, food vendors and yes, potato salad, all for charity. [More]

When you pledge your money to a Kickstarter project, you do so knowing that you won’t actually be charged unless the project reaches its funding goal. While that protects against an unfundable project from running off with your money, what about those projects that reached their goal but still don’t deliver the promised rewards? [More]

Since backing a hardware project on a crowdfunded site feels like shopping, people get annoyed when the things they “bought” don’t show up when expected. Like the Ping Wallet, which we featured here on the site yesterday. A year after raising $59,000, the smart wallet is the subject of a Kickstarter backer revolt. However, the company’s CEO has re-emerged and says that the delays are just because he wants to send backers a wallet that doesn’t suck. [More]

Reader Maxim is running a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter right now to print up some really cool playing cards. Yet he didn’t contact us to ask us to write about his project: we don’t normally post about items in the crowdfunding phase, anyway. He was concerned about a message he received from another Kickstarter campaign creator, who was asking him to swap pledges to artificially inflate each other’s totals. [More]

No one can prove with 100% certainty that the person who left a glib comment on the Kickstarter page for the game Confederate Express was Maksym Pashanin, game creator and alleged AirBNB squatter. However, the comment did prompt backers to declare the project a “scam” and demand refunds. [More]

On the one hand, who wouldn’t want to be sitting pretty in a backyard fort with hundreds of water balloons that took only minutes to fill and tied themselves. On the other hand — no, I can’t. There is no downside to a device that allows you to fill 37 balloons with water at one time and spares you the time/pain of tying all those slippery little suckers. [More]

If you ever feel like there’s no one out there that supports your dreams and deepest desires to better yourself and learn new things, things you didn’t think you could do before, you’re problem wrong. Because even a guy with the simple goal of making potato salad for the first time managed to get more than $22,000 (as of this writing to fulfill his destiny). [More]

In what is believed to be the first consumer protection action taken by a state involving Kickstarter project, the attorney general for Washington state has filed suit against a company that raised $25,000 on the crowdfunding site but has allegedly failed to deliver anything to its backers or offer refunds. [More]